


Amends

by navaan



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Coda, Complicated Relationships, Episode AU: s03e08-09 Human Nature/Family of Blood, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Introspection, POV Female Character, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 10:22:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16852243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: The Doctor may be an end or a beginning, but it's John Smith she fell in love with.





	Amends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Karios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karios/gifts).



> Some dialog taken directly from _Family of Blood_.

Her mother had told her very early on, “It's the little things. The companionship.”

She had never thought much about it. Girls grew up, became women – and women found husbands and married. And while not men were good men and not all marriages were happy, it was on you to make the best of it.

Working as a nurse had brought her close to doctors and soldiers – and she had seen many relations going on when men or women lay sick. Among them, she found her soldier. When Oliver had courted and then married her, the path of her life seemed set. There would be children, and the companionship her mother had talked about. Sometimes life would be hard, but there would always be the little things.

It had been a simple plan.

A soldier's wife knew what she had gotten into. A lot of the time, her household was her own. “When I come home, Joan, I need you. Your gentle smile and your companionship,” Oliver explained before he hugged her close to leave her for the first time.

It hadn't been the last goodbye and not yet the final one.

The last one came in the form of a letter.

After a few short years, she was a widow.

And so her next life began.

...

As widow her prospects were still good. She was young. She was a nurse. And before long she was on her feet again. 

She missed her husband and the life that had never been hers that had included boys of their own. But at Farringham School she had boys to take care of. Boys who would be men like her Oliver.

It was a small solace in her grief.

And so time passed.

…

Her next life was about to start. But it remained that. A precursor, a glimpse. Nobody could have known though when John Smith appeared at the doorstep of their school with all the right references and took up the post as history teacher.

…

John Smith seemed like a timid man to her. She wasn’t one to cast judgment hastily. But there was something about him, nervous and insecure. Something that spoke of dreams.

It wasn’t until she saw him stand in front of his class the first time that she understood there was still inside the tall thin frame and a fire in the friendly brown eyes. He ordered his class like you would a company on the battlefield. His boys -- _boys_ \-- did not always remember their place, but they recognized something in him. He had to give out fewer punishments than other new teachers. 

It wasn’t that strength that drew her. It was his kindness. His smile. The ability to laugh. 

...

The story was as old as time. 

Oliver had met her as young nurse. Mr. Smith looked to her as she administered cough syrup and made sure his maid Martha did her work without disturbing him.

For the first time, they spoke more than quickly uttered niceties.

For the second time, she felt her heart warm at the interest that shone from a man’s eyes.

Both were lonely -- right here at school with too many mischievous and brave boys, with teachers and maids. 

“Is he alright?” Martha asked, but didn’t look too concerned. Joan had caught her checking his forehead moments before. For a maid of her circumstances forgot her place with terrible frequency.

“He’ll be right as rain,” Joan answered, not sure why she wasn’t shooing the girl out.

She knew. Because John’s eyes follow her and not Martha. And there was no other way to find that answer than to test it.

…

“War,” John said, “is never a good business even for those who profit for a time. Too much is lost. Lives, land, crops, decency.” 

He was talking to her and not his class, but she had heard him give the strict accounts of battles and command his boys to aim true and shoot during firearm training. They were reaching future soldiers and nobody was forgetting it.

“And yet,” he added. “Sometimes wars have to be fought.”

“Of course,” she agreed easily. It was a truth all of them had accepted long before anyone had thought to make an argument of it. Oliver, she thought, would have liked John. 

But not for his clear view of war and history and the glory their Empire needed to fight for. 

John Smith, she had discovered, was more. 

He was a man with dreams. He wrote and sketched with a quick fountain pen scratching over the paper, never quite able to keep up with his thoughts. 

Joan was no romantic. She had never had the patience for novels. She had read all of her husband's letters about far off places enraptured by the descriptions and the reality of his experiences. 

When John spoke of the adventurer he was in his dreams, she smiled and listened as enraptured and attentive as she used to read every line of those letters.

“You should write the story,” she suggested when they were out walking. “Writing is an honored profession.”

“Teaching is what I want to do,” he concluded with a smile. “Always.”

He got the faraway look that she saw flicker over his face when he was trying to chase a memory that was just beyond the grasp of his conscious mind. 

“Always, yes,” he confirmed, although she hadn’t shown any signs of disagreement.

Her new life was at the tip of her fingers. The courtship had only started. Like that memory that escaped John, her new life flitted past her, a forever-might-have-been.

…

“When you were a child, where did you play? All those secret little places, the dens, and hideaways that only a child knows? Tell me, John. Please tell me,” she begged because she knew. Already she knew.

“How can you think that I'm not real? When I kissed you, was that a lie?”

“No, it wasn't. No.” John loved her. She loved John. But what did it mean, when John was not John at all?

“But this Doctor sounds like some, some romantic lost prince. Would you rather that? Am I not enough?”

“No, that's not true. Never.” There were many words she wanted to add but didn't know how to find.

John wanted to stay. Like any human, he didn't want to die. He begged and pleased, but even Joan could see that the Family had to be stopped. 

And she'd seen the notebook – the journal of memory-dreams that had haunted him. She knew right now, right here, she wanted nothing more than John, but John had been the dream all this time.

“I've got to go.”

He was right. As much as it pained her to admit, Martha had laid it all out. “Martha was right about one thing, though. Those boys, they're children. John Smith wouldn't want them to fight, never mind the Doctor. The John Smith I was getting to know, he knows it's wrong, doesn't he?”

A voice called from outside.

John, still caught in his struggle, asked: “What choice do I have?”

What was she to say? What choice had fate left her?

She resented the Doctor for hiding, for making her love an illusion. John she loved with an unshakable trust. He would do the right thing. And if that meant he wouldn't return from this battle then so be it.

...

The Doctor returned in tears and flames. 

At first, his face was what scared her. Hard lines and not a hint of contentment. John’s plea still rang in her ears. Was the return of the Doctor the murder of John Smith? She only had to look at the Doctor to _know_ that this time she'd been widowed before the marriage. 

She had hoped. But her hopes and dreams weren't important now.

Their fingers touched, the blasted watch under their joined hands and there it was, all laid bare: The future of John and Joan joined forever, human. Marriage, children, grandchildren. A happy long life, old age – warmth and love.

Longing nearly ate her, tempted her with violent intensity. This was normal love. The life she wanted. The _man_ she wanted. Not the lonely dream prince.

And as she thought it, she saw glimpses of herself in his story, saw her face where the face of “Rose” had looked from the pages, saw her hand in his in front of yellow skies and orange grass, saw herself walking across white hallways in trousers she would never dare to wear. A different life, an exciting life of exploration – with a man who did not seek family or rest or content, who was forever while she grew older and longed for Earth.

…

“Please, come with me,” he said. And he meant all he had told her: That John was still there, inside of him, part of him. 

But he was the Doctor now. How could he understand her longing for the brave human man, she'd lost. He remembered John Smith, but what _was_ John Smith to him?

“You're not giving him back,” she thought. “You can't have me.”

And then she asked the question about the Doctor's cowardice. Why had he hidden here? Why had people died _here_?

He didn't answer and she knew this as where they would part ways.

But at the last second, he stopped. “If you could take just one trip. Where would you go?”

“In space and time?”

“In all of space and time,” he answered and at that moment their eyes met – and there he was: _John_. Right there, in the simple need for companionship.

Hesitant, she turned back to him, wondering, remembering, thinking of children never born and planets never visited, John – dead yet here. 

“To a place where there's no war,” she declared with the conviction of the woman who had seen the warrior bring destruction to her peaceful school because he'd thought to be merciful.

Her shot had fired and penetrated his defenses. She doubted there was anywhere he could take her. Now that he was the lonely prince again, the human widow was no longer what he needed. Taking her along was a debt he wanted to pay for murder and suicide.

To her surprise, he held out his hand. “Alright then,” he offered. “A place without war.”

Her breath got stuck in her throat. “Where?” 

“There's a place I know,” he said. 

“Only one?”

“Depends on the definition,” he admitted. “There are peaceful times in many places. But that's not what you asked for.”

Her grief warred with her curiosity, her love with the loathing.

“We can be back without anyone knowing,” he offered. “You can step right out of this house as if nothing ever happened.”

“If I come?”

“Yes,” he said.  
“It's a time machine. We go. I can give you that. And we'll be back in the blink of an eye.”

Unwaveringly, his hand stretched towards her, he waited. 

She took his hand.

At that moment, she didn't want to admit it. But a new life had started.

…

They walked among the locals of the peaceful planet, dancers performing only feet away. 

“How long does it last?” she wanted to know.

“7342 years,” he answered as if it was obvious.

Did he know what it felt to live for that long?

“And then?”

“Daleks,” he said as if it meant anything. “Might even have been a ripple of the Time War.” He sniffed, smelling the air. “Might have been, yes.”

He sounded regretful.

Around them, life and culture were thriving. Peoples of all races and colors were dancing together and laughing in time with the music.

“There are no soldiers?”

“No soldiers, no guards. It's peace and quiet for more than 7000 years. It's Utopia. Humanity has adapted and learned.”

“Good,” she said and felt a smile prick at her lips for the very first time. “That is good.”

A glimmer of hope lay seed in her heart.

There were wars ahead for her.

But knowing such a place existed was enough.

She leaned up to kiss him. “One more,” she said. “One more.”

“Peaceful?” he asked, watching her with cautious optimism. He was talking faster, gibberish mostly. But sometimes, in moments like this one, he was simply John Smith to her.

“Yes,” she said.

He took her hand again and led her back to his impossible blue box. Martha was leaning against the door. When they approached she smiled sadly and nodded. “That's how it starts,” she promised.

...

She refused to go through his rooms full of clothes to pick something more comfortable to wear. Joan Redfern was who she was. Hiding it would have felt like a betrayal. She wasn't the woman from the vision wearing trousers. She was the woman John Smith had fallen in love with.

During a stay on the moon of Triteem, a happy little girl walked up to Joan to give her a flower sparkling in rainbow colors.

That was all.

It brought the memories of family and home, of children-never-born. 

“Time to go home,” she said. Selfishly, she hoped for him to say: “Yes.”

There was still the watch. He could still come back with her.

Of course, he did not.

…

Her next life started the moment she walked back to the school, the notebook clutched in her hand. Her parting gift – an eternal token of affection, the remnant of a man who never was. Martha had hugged her goodbye, and with more knowledge of the universe, Joan returned the gesture, feeling sad for her lonely prince, but also sad for this young woman who was seeing wonders but had not yet found contentedness.

Joan felt like, despite her grief, their travels had returned some of her own ability to _feel_.

When the whooshing, groaning sound of the box sounded she did not turn back.

But when it appeared in her path, she stopped.

Had he come back? 

Her heart sang with longing before she could stop it. 

Had he come back to her after all?

The Doctor or John.

When the door opened a tall man in a dark leather jacket walked out. 

“Sorry,” he said and grinned cheekily, “where's this?”

“If it's not Rio don't tell me to come out,” a young female voice called.

“It's not Rio,” a male voice said and there was laughter inside the ship.

“Doctor?” Joan asked and in her mind, it all came back – the stories, the faces, the records of travels impossible and real.

This wasn't _her_ Doctor – not her John.

“Yes? Do I know you?”

She laughed. “I know you,” she said. “This isn't Rio. Off you go.”

He stared at her then, long and searching. “I will know what this means one day?”

“Perhaps we both will,” she said and smiled.

Slowly – reluctantly – he dipped back into his spaceship, the blue door falling shut behind him.

John was no more.

But the Doctor was out there – ever-changing, brave, kind and terrible, lonely and not alone.

She clutched the journal tightly and set off towards the school. 

Her life was still waiting for her there and it seemed a little more fantastic for all that she'd seen and experienced.

A soft breeze around her seemed to whisper: _He'll always remember you. The little things. The companionship. The love he had to leave behind. John's memory lives on and so will yours._

She arrived at Farringham with a smile on her face – a new life before her, memories and secrets to keep forever through war and peace and _living_.


End file.
